The Beauty of Non-Objects

We all know what objects are: they are things, stuff we can identify. But what about non-objects? What does that even mean?

In a great paper from 1984, two psychologists set out to explore this bizarre concept. Specifically, they wanted to see how people identify and recall objects as compared to non-objects, in relationship to language processing in the brain. So what are non-objects? They are weird little pictures that look like nothing:

There are 88 total non-objects, a selection of which are below.

As you can see, they look sort of like real objects, but not really. Number 10 looks a bit like an internal organ, 8 like a can opener, and 1 like a series of ears. But they are all emphatically not objects.

Non-objects have gone on to have a wonderful afterlife in many experiments in cognitive science. Here is screenshot that shows that over 14,000 papers discuss these “nonobjects”:

Of course, there are fundamental philosophical questions raised by non-objects: Are there more non-objects than objects? If I construct a non-object, what is its object status? And many more.

In the meantime, enjoy the non-objects and their delightful cubist qualities. And check out their “objectness” ratings in the appendix of the paper.

Thanks to Mike Vitevitch and Rudy Goldstein, who first pointed out non-objects to me.